8.

[I created my books to prepare suitable people to defend our lands from a great threat. I created an organization who will ensure suitable people are born, and another to ensure that the books are provided to them. If the amulet and book have accepted you, it seems these societies are still fit for purpose.

This book may come to you as an inconvenience, a diversion from what you thought your life would be. Or, if all has gone completely to plan you will not. You will be well suited to the task laid before you, with all its trials. And if I do vex you, consider how vexed I was to be given the task of making this all come to pass.

I was already an old and infirm woman when I was given a vision of a terrible enemy that would attach these lands in a time long after my death. I was shown that without my preparations this evil would wipe all life from the earth from sea to sea.

I will confess I considered simply letting this happen. But while I can count the number of people I like, or even tolerate, using the fingers of one hand—people in general, I have nothing against. Especially children who have a certain charm before the world ruins them.

My eyesight is already too poor to write this book, so it is my son is writing to my dictation. I have already laid a spell onto the tome that will reveal only one page each day to its designated users. But in times of dire need, you may beseech it to provide a needed page before its time and out of order. Do this only when there is a pressing and imminent threat to the land, to the book, or to your life. It will impair your learning of this difficult but vital craft.

Frustration, I have learned, is a great and necessary teacher when properly applied. Therefore, your task and the needful process for the development of your talent will be laid out to you only gradually and for a very long time, many of your questions will remain unanswered. Forgive me for this or not, I have a fair greater calling than pleasing such as you.

Think of it this way. Great Truth is a strange creature that is trapped in a dark cavern. It wishes to be rescued but it will never call out until you have already seen it.

You are on the path to a Great Truth, but if you seek it clumsily or it finds you before the proper time – you will most certainly perish. The fate of nations depends on my guiding you along a precise and trap-laden path to a very particular happenstance.

Be bold, but be careful. Much depends upon it.]

Inri read the heavily written script that covered the first page several times. His responses were muted. The world was expanding around him to encompass all that these words suggested and it did not occur to him to doubt any of what he had just read.

Tellus was a well-doing and insular land that encouraged community, self-satisfaction, and love of tradition. Even these tremulous beginnings of anxiety, curiosity, and isolation were prying Inro further away from this fellow-feeling. Beginning t make him… strange.

On the fifth reading, he noticed there was a small tear in the center of the page, prying at the edges he could see just the tiniest sliver of what might be the page beneath or even the one beneath that.

Pressing his fingertip against this gap, his mind was blasted with a rush of arcane verdant energy—and he knew no more.